From the looks of the announcement, they're going to delete all the content too. That bugs me. Even if I was never able to get an account (they wanted my phone or credit card number) I still liked the forum. There was a link to it at the bottom of every movie's page; the comments, tho sometimes harsh, provided extra info on the movie. I'll miss that. Doubly sad: the Internet Archive can't crawl IMDb's forum; the robot.txt file blocks them. Even the forum closing announcement is blocked.

Wow. Thanks for posting this. This is unfortunate. I would often go to IMDB after watching an old movie to check out the boards there. There could be a host of information.

Hopefully the user reviews will remain, but maybe not. I remember when Netflix decided it was in 'our' best interest to remove user contributed content like lists as well. In reality, its discomfort with user contributed content on their site damaging their brand. Its a real concern, but things like moderators could help that, and it drives traffic to their main site and not tangential sites like some tumblr or snapchat account.

I always found it neat to go there after watching a movie with a vague ending and read people's interpretations of the ending ( and there almost always was a thread on that subject). I can't believe they're going to scrub everything that's previously been posted too. Very disappointing.

scotland wrote:Wow. Thanks for posting this. This is unfortunate. I would often go to IMDB after watching an old movie to check out the boards there. There could be a host of information.

Hopefully the user reviews will remain, but maybe not. I remember when Netflix decided it was in 'our' best interest to remove user contributed content like lists as well. In reality, its discomfort with user contributed content on their site damaging their brand. Its a real concern, but things like moderators could help that, and it drives traffic to their main site and not tangential sites like some tumblr or snapchat account.

Funny thing: All of IMDb's content is user contributed, like Wikipedia but much older. They started on Usenet as a list of actresses with pretty eyes. There's still a bunch of old Usenet posts hidden on IMDb's servers: http://www.imdb.com/reviews/index.html

This is awful. One of my favorite things about IMDB is going to the page of some B-movie and seeing one of the cast or crew post candidly about their experiences decades ago (or what they're up to now). I really hope that the Wayback has the best stuff saved; there's no way that I can remember all of what I'd want to "archive for personal use" before it's gone.